Entries in 2017 Speed Chess Championship
(18)

The first quarter-final match of Chess.com's Speed Chess Championship was between Alexander Grischuk and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, and the replay can be watched here. (To avoid spoilers, I'll give the result in the comments.) Tuesday (i.e. today for most of the world, tomorrow for a few time zone stragglers), another match: Sergey Karjakin takes on Ian Nepomniachtchi starting at 1 p.m. ET.

The final match of the round of 16 is over, and Magnus Carlsen is through to the quarterfinals. Carlsen won 20.5-5.5, and if anything the match was even more lopsided than the score would suggest. (The replay of the broadcast is here.)

This past Wednesday, Chess.com's Speed Chess Championship marched on with its penultimate first round match, between world #2 Maxime Vachier-Lagrave and the young Jeffery Xiong. The video is here, and I'll give the result in the comments section, to avoid providing a spoiler to anyone who wants to enjoy the match as if live.

In the previous post I mentioned the online speed chess matches between Levon Aronian and Ian Nepomniachtchi and between Fabiano Caruana and Hou Yifan. They're over now, and can be viewed here and here, respectively. To avoid spoilers, I'll give the results in the comments.

For those who haven't seen Chess.com's blitz battles before, here's how they work. The start with 90 minutes of 5'+2", take about a three minute break, play 60 minutes of 3'+2", take one more short break, and then conclude with half an hour of 1'+2". There are extremely brief interviews before the matches, longer interviews afterwards (depending on the quality of the connection and the players' facility with English), and running commentary (often pretty corny) throughout.

Chess.com's 2017 Speed Chess Championship continued this past week with a match between Alexander Grischuk and Richard Rapport. (The action can be watched here.) To avoid spoilers I won't give the result here, but will give a brief recap in the comments section.

This past week there were a couple more matches in Chess.com's 2017 Speed Chess Championship: Sergey Karjakin vs. Georg Meier and Wesley So vs. Anish Giri. The first match was an utter blowout in terms of the score, but on a game-by-game basis the players were well-matched. Karjakin (the reigning world blitz champion) did everything a bit better than Meier, and while Meier also had his chances Karjakin was far more efficient in converting his opportunities.

The So-Giri match was another story altogether. It went back and forth all the way and came down to the wire. I won't offer any spoilers: it's entirely up to you whether you want to see the result first or relive the drama for yourself.

The Karjakin-Meier video is here, and So-Giri is here. The next match is a ways off: Alexander Grischuk vs. Richard Rapport takes place July 20. One last bit of info: the winner of the So-Giri match jumps from the frying pan into the fire, and will get Magnus Carlsen next, assuming the world champion gets past bottom seed Gadir Guseinov on October 5.

The 16-player field has been whittled down to 15, as the first match has already taken place, between Nakamura and Sergey Grigoriants. (You can watch a replay of the games and coverage here.) It won't be much of a spoiler to learn that Nakamura won a very one-sided match, but his opponent put up a very creditable fight until several games into the bullet portion.

Two matches are coming up this week: Karjakin against Georg Meier tomorrow (Wednesday) at 1 p.m. ET/7 p.m. CET, and 24 hours later it's time for a heavyweight battle between So and Giri. After that, nothing happens in the event until June 22, when another superstar event between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Aronian is in the offing.